BEOWULF CLUSTERS
You don’t need a supercomputer to achieve high-performance computing. The Beowulf Cluster, from an original idea by Thomas Sterling and Donald Becker at NASA in 1994, is a group of normally, but not necessarily, identical PCs networked together and running software that shares processing between them.
Most run Linux, or BSD distributions tailored to the task, such as ClusterKnoppix, but there’s nothing specifically that marks a cluster out as a Beowulf, that’s just the name of the original grouping.
Since 2017, every system on the Top 500 list of supercomputers has used Beowulf methods to some degree, aided by the fact that such a cluster is almost infinitely expandable, limited only by network overheads. To this end, the simple Ethernet that joins up a Beowulf has been replaced by optical connections in the fastest supercomputers, with Nvidia’s NVLink providing a bridge between its GPUs.
The idea is popular with Raspberry Pi owners, as the inexpensive boards can scale through a simple network switch and the Message Passing Interface software. Such a cluster can make a nice web server, or for learning Docker or Kubernetes, or as a fast file server for a home office setup.